Conures are often called the clowns of the parrot world due to their constant attention seeking behavior including hanging upside-down and swaying back and forth or "dancing".

Despite being large for parakeets, conures are lightly built with long tails and small (but strong) beaks.

Nanday conures (Aratinga nenday) have a distinctive black head, and wings and tails tipped with dark-blue feathers.

At least one report suggests that they are highly adaptable to human encroachment on their territories, but the exact status of the species in the wild is unknown.

Flocks of nanday conures live wild in parts of Florida, notably the west coast, including areas of St. Petersburg and Clearwater.

Additionally, flocks of wild Nanday conures live in Siesta Key, Sarasota, Florida.

A large flock of nanday conures lives in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles.

However, golden-capped conures are prolific breeders, making them popular birds in aviculture, and hand-fed young are generally available.

Pyrrhura species are growing in popularity as pet birds, primarily due to their quiet nature (relative to comparable companion parrots), their affectionate and intelligent personalities, and the increasing number of color mutations developed in several of these species.

The golden conure or Queen of Bavaria conure, Guaruba guarouba (recently reclassified from Aratinga guarouba) is, as the name implies, covered all over with bright yellow feathers, except for the green wing-tip feathers and the greyish horn-colored beak.

They can learn to talk and they usually bond very well with people, especially if hand-raised, and although not the most colorful bird, they make great pets.

The exceedingly rare yellow-eared conure or Ognorhynchus icterotis of Colombia and Ecuador, was never common in aviculture and has not successfully bred in captivity.

Conuropsis carolinensis, the Carolina parakeet, was one of only two parrot species endemic to the United States in recorded history.

American bird hunters reported that Carolina parakeets would return to mourn dead members of the flock, making themselves easy targets.

Considered a pest, popular in the pet trade, and bearing plume feathers valued for hats, this species was hunted to extinction around the beginning of the 1900s.

All members of the order Psittaciformes have a characteristic curved beak shape with the upper mandible having slight mobility in the joint with the skull and a generally erect stance.

Internal relationships of conures are poorly understood, though it seems evident that to make them a natural grouping, the quaker parakeet,[5] the thick-billed parrot, and Brotogeris[6] should be included, and often are.

They are the subject of a film, The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, based on a story by Mark Bittner.

[8] Multiple colonies of cherry-headed conures live in the San Gabriel Valley (the suburbs northeast of Los Angeles).

Flocks of 50 or more descend on fruit trees during their bearing season, staying for a few days and making a deafening racket.

These are documented by the California Parrot Project in affiliation with the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, and in cooperation with the Pasadena Audubon Society.

A colony of half-moon conures has been observed in the Belmont Shore area of Long Beach, California, since the late 1980s.